“So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections.” And just like that, with the thesis set, Maria Popova takes us through over five hundred pages of invisible connections between Johanns Kepler in 1617 to the launch of the Voyager space probe in 1977.
Between the two, centuries filled with scientists, thinkers, poets, protagonists, love, despair, and the conversations people have across time, space, and generations even though they may never meet or speak or even know the other ever existed.
Figuring is the manifestation of years of writing on The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) where every post is a web of links to open resources that share a handful of themes. It is one of the few places on the internet where I still feel like there is hope for, well, the internet.
This book takes time. While it’s far from the longest book on the shelf, the density of the themes and the pure poetry of how it is all woven together demands that you slow down, take it in, and mark the hell out of the margins with a pencil (the pages of my copy are too thin to handle the inks I prefer using). It has been nearly two years since I started in on Figuring and promising myself to spend more time soaking it in this year. My first copy was left on the ScotRail between London and Glasgow. I was halfway through annotations and had to start anew with a used copy I found at a bookshop once I got back to the states.
Figuring is loaded with a thousand throughlines from all the texts we groaned about in high school – the transcendentalists, the romantics, the poets – alongside the progressive discoveries made in scientific fields, most notably by women, throughout history. A majority of the last few chapters focuses on the history of Rachel Carson – the researcher who wrote Silent Spring and would be the driving force behind the banning of DDT, establishing pesticide protocols, and eventually the establishment of the EPA.
I may have finished the readthrough, but I am far from done with this book.